The future of news is snuggled in your pocket.

The number of people reading news on mobile devices is surging, finally fulfilling the future that has been predicted for smartphones over the past few years. Last night, Hacks Hackers Boston held a discussion on the topic “Start the Presses: News sites of the future, told by the people building them.”

The panel, which drew around 100 people, was held at The Boston Globe headquarters and discussed where news sites were headed, specifically looking at content management systems (CMSs), such as Drupal and WordPress. Speakers included Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, the open source content management system; Adam Gaffin, creator of Universal Hub; Andrew Phelps, a wbur.org reporter; and Austin Gardner-Smith of BostInnovation. It was moderated by Michael Morisy of Muckrock.com.

Here are some highlights:

“Non-article” articles. The consensus was that content is shifting from the longer form article/blog post format that was inherited legacy media to new, shorter forms. Many of these new forms are taking their cues from Twitter and are shorter, quicker or are narratives constructed from multiple voices. There is not enough time, given the speed of breaking news, to compose fully processed pieces. There are “curated posts” and “value added” posts, said Gardner-Smith, who added “this is the Twitterfication” of the news ecosystem. Phelps said that WBUR was going to start replacing longer blog posts with little squibs that are no more than 140 characters (“Totally arbitrary”).

Mobile means rethinking of websites. Mobile usage is increasing dramatically. Gardner-Smith said traffic from mobile devices on BostInnovation has increased from 2 percent last year, to 4.5 percent in November, to 13 percent in January. The iPhone is the number one device, followed by the surging iPad, with Android third. “It is huge and getting much bigger,” he said. As a result, it has made people rethink the design of their websites. Phelps said that WBUR has made a conscious decision to write simpler “clean articles” or “clean posts” that look good on mobile devices. Buytaert said if he were starting Drupal now he probably would have started it as a platform for mobile devices first and desktops second.

Facebook, the future of news, is social. Facebook referrals are on the rise and in one case soaring. Phelps said Facebook is now in contention as the number one referrer of news. “For a lot of people, Facebook is a primary source of news,” said Phelps. As a result, WBUR has had to rethink how its content is both viewed and shared. “We’ve tweaked it so it would look slick on Facebook,” Phelps said. For example, Facebook would often grab random images from the article page that had nothing to do with the article content. WBUR has redesigned its interface so that articles are linked to relevant images.

The Daily and the “appification” of news? The panelists generally questioned the strategy of Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily,” which can only be read on an iPad and thus is moving away from open content. Tying content to only one device seems to be an odd decision, Phelps said. Even if you go to the website, it instructs you to download the iPad app but that information needs to be part of the larger content ecosystem, the panelists agreed. One man has started posting The Daily Indexed headlines on Tumblr. The panelists were less than impressed. Gaffin said, “You don’t read the stories, but you look at the headlines and realize that they are not stories you would want to read.”

Gardner-Smith actually argued that The Daily seems to be moving in the opposite direction of BostInnovation, which wants its content to be syndicated and picked up, rather than consumed solely on its own site. “We are moving to a branded content ecosystem,” Gardner-Smith said.

Gawker Redesign: Design fail? Panel members universally panned the Gawker redesign, though they said anything Nick Denton was doing was worth paying attention to, since he has made the right decision so many times in regards to the direction of the news industry. Some interesting features they noted include: the emphasis on Facebook sharing, internal pages sharing the same look as the homepage since many users are coming in from the “side doors,” and the emphasis on art direction of individual articles. “I think it’s a design fail. I don’t think it’s a strategy or ethos fail,” said Gardner-Smith.

Too Trendy? Phelps noted that news sites often suffered from “shiny object syndrome.” People will literally come up to his desk and ask. “What’s Quora? Let’s put it on the site.”

Source or Not Open Source Content Management System (CMS open source, rather than proprietary, is the way to go (everyone uses an open source system). Buytaert said, “While things are not perfect, open source CMSs are uniquely qualified to keep up on the web. They are not developed by a small engineering team, rather they are designed by thousands of people around the world.” And as Gardner-Smith put it, “The beauty of open source is that if you need it, someone has probably already built it.”

Drupal vs. WordPress. Drupal was considered more powerful, but much more difficult to use than WordPress. It would not be recommended to anyone who is uncomfortable with PHP, the programming language that WordPress and Drupal are both written in. “They’ve all used WordPress, and they’ve hacked it to death,” said Buytaert in reference to the other panelists. Drupal tends to be intended for more robust sites. Sites that use Drupal include Playboy, Fast Company, BBC and Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera actually had a 2,000 percent surge in traffic during the recent crisis, which forced it to use a hosting service.

It can be an advantage that so many people have suffered the Drupal pain. As Gaffin, who uses Drupal, put it, “I don’t have technical support. Google is my technical support.” He puts error messages into Drupal to see what solutions others have come up with.

The rivalry between WordPress and Drupal is less personal than you would expect. Buytaert said he is friends with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. Drupal and WordPress are two of the three large open source content management systems. Buytaert said the two of them have a friendly game going where they try to draw attention to each other’s systems. Mullenweg has even sent baby onesies with the WordPress logo on them to Buytaert. Right now Mullenweg is winning, said Buytaert, since Mullenweg has given two formal interviews wearing a Drupal T-shirt. The WordPress t-shirt Mullenweg sent him was too small, said Buytaert.

Marissa Lowman and Jennifer 8. Lee contributed their notes to this post.